Ship me outta here

I'm behind on posting for this blog. As I go through my day I make mental notes about stuff to blog about. "Oh look, I go to all the trouble to open all the downstairs windows for the cats so they can get fresh air and they both go to the air-conditioned upstairs to sleep the day away."

Or, "How is it possible I spend 2 hours researching payment options for my website and feel at the end like I'm in the exact same place where I started, with absolutely no increase in my knowledge?"

Or (and this one is quite frequent): "Should I cut my hair or continue to let it grow out." The great debate continues. But then I never get around to posting and by the time I do, I'm thinking, "Eh, that's old news."

Okay, positive things on the marketing side. I checked out Amazon tonight and for a mere $30 (and 55% discount they take from me!) they will post my book on their site. Yea! Even though it means less money for me for every book sold through their site vs. mine, there's a level of validity that comes with having your book marketed on Amazon. Plus, I won't have to deal with shipping which frankly is just about worth giving the book away for free.

I was wigging out the other night about shipping. "How will we handle this?" I demanded of Blair who had literally just walked in the door.

"Don't worry honey, we'll get through it," he said, having no idea what I was referring to. It's a pretty safe stock answer of his.

"I mean it!" I said. "If we use PayPal does that mean we have to open every e-mail, copy and paste the shipping address into Word, print a label, print a shipping label, wrap it up and get it out the door? What sort of tracking system will we have to guarantee we don't overlook an order? We'll have to pack and ship every night to stay on top of it."

"Whoa," he said. "That's a bit much. Why don't we accumulate orders and spend one night a week shipping?"

"One night??" I screeched. "The book can already take a week to deliver! What if our shipping day is on a Friday and someone orders on Saturday? We're going to make them wait 2 weeks for their book? No way!" I'm in a lather.

"Amazon sometimes has a 4 week window for shipping," Blair pointed out.

I stopped foaming at the mouth and considered. "Hmmm...that's true."

"And it's not like we're expecting to get 500 orders a day," he said. "We'll stay on top of it. We'll handle it."

"Well," I grumped. "I guess that would be okay."

"We'll have shipping night 2 nights a week," he offered. I beamed.

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And I make fun of my friends for being drama queens. Lord, I must be stopped.

Okay, I have a list of things to blog about and I'm afraid of forgetting so I'll just list here to refer to later:

- Ghost Cat
- PayPal vs. bizhosting.com vs. Netfirms merchants accounts
- Squarespace.com (with a shoutout to Melody and Rachel)
- Gift Store Marketing
- How annoying Bogger.com can be with their slow download times
- cute picture I took of Lucy with my flowers
- Lucy getting ticked off that Olivia joined our game and her stalking off and refusing to speak to us
- Spooning a Cat
- Workshop and speech ideas (related to cat book)
- Why I don't really need a new laptop but have almost managed to convince myself otherwise
- Methods to my madness - staying organized
- And much more! (it's the marketing person in me. Had to add it).

I know Rachel and Melody are looking at this thinking, "She should use tada list!" It's a cool enough way to keep track of things, but I could never desert my beloved post-it-notes.

I'm giving a speech tomorrow in front of 30 Toastmasters on the topic of "Establishing Yourself As A Professional Speaker." Everyone think good thoughts for me tomorrow at 9am.

Stressing Out on Pre-Promotion

I spent most of yesterday going through Dan Poynter's Self-Publishing Manual and ordering LCC and CPI numbers and such. It was frustrating because it seemed like every time I found a form and got halfway through filling it out, I'd find out that first I need this other number to complete the form. So I'd go to get that number only, oops!, you need this other number first. It felt like I chased myself in circles all day.

I'm really stressing out about the whole marketing / pre-promotion effort. To get in gift stores I need a distributor but apparently no one likes to give out names. So I could go to a national conference and get a booth and try to find them that way. What's off-putting to me is that there are hundreds of different means of promotion. Instead of finding this comforting, I'm finding myself with an ulcer as I worry that I'm selecting the wrong venues at the wrong times with the wrong people. Or that I'm too late to do anything.

I find I'm constantly reminding myself to breathe. Life is good. I'm putting a book out I love and whether it makes a great showing or not really is irrelevant. My competitive nature kicks in with "I must make it a best seller!" but really I don't have to. What promotion and marketing I do will be fine and if, once I get in the swing, I find I can kick it up a notch, so be it. But I can't paralyze myself with fear and do nothing because I'm worried about doing everything wrong.

I want to go talk to local gift stores to see how they handle ordering books but shouldn't I have a copy of my book to take in and show them that I'm not just some fly-by-night writer who threw a book together but that I'm a dedicated, professional writer with a collection of pre-published stories? That's what I mean when I say I don't know what to do. Do I visit now or do I wait until I have book in hand? Or is it too late by then?

Breathe. Yes, it's all good. I look around and see how good I have it. I get to work from home (with my cats!!) doing work that fulfills me and makes me feel like I'm doing something. I have friends, family, a great home, food, a car, my health, I husband I adore and who returns the feeling---life is nothing but good for me. If my worst problem in life is "I can't work out the promotion strategy for my book" than I need to just shut up and take a back seat. People would kill for such problems.

It's my need to be perfect that creates the stress. So perhaps this whole book experience is also an opportunity to work on that issue. Because really, perfect people (or people who try to convince us they are) are boring at best and annoying at worst.

I much prefer the screw-ups!

Cheers,
Dena

Cover

Still can't decide on the cover art for the book. My illustrator, Linda Santell, is working on "new eyes" for the cat that graces the current cover. My instructions to her are "Less happy, more sneaky, but not mean or evil looking." What a joy I must be to work with as a client.

I'm wondering how many times I'm allowed to go back to my cover designer and say, "Could you change just one more thing....?"

I'm feeling good about the dual websites. My friend Rachel told me yesterday that according to all her reading, it's better to have more and separate websites as it's more likely people will find you.

I checked my stats for my personal website and found out last year that just under 2000 people from almost 50 countries visited the site. Isn't that wild that I can get a breakdown by country on who saw my site when? Big Brother is really watching.

Website Highs & Lows

Melody (my talented website designer) just posted the rough site for my book to the web. I love it! In fact, her website design is influencing my choice of cover. I have 4 cover designs to choose from and was leaning away from one until I saw how Melody used it and the colors from it to create the website. Now I'll probably end up selecting that cover just for that reason. (That, and if I e-mail family and friends and ask them to tell me one more time which cover they really, really like, they'll hunt me down and stone me.)

Website Woes: I'm panicking. Do I need two websites? Would I have been better to incorporate the web pages for Lessons In Stalking into my existing site? Will people be confused at two sites? Will they visit both?

Frankly, I like the look of both sites and am loathe to give one up. But from a practicality standpoint, I need to consider it. And why the heck didn't I think about this before???